"The Little Mermaid movie, just re-released by Disney, is pretty much about a little mermaid, Ariel, who dreams of falling in love with a human being and then she is in an underwater kingdom ruled by her father who prohibits contact with humans. She makes a deal with this witch and this witch trades her voice for human legs and one thing leads to another," explains a YouTuber.
"The idea of an underwater kingdom and mermaids in the spirit realm is not just a depiction of some author's fantasy.
"In ancient Greece, the god Triton was actually a merman and the sirens were sea creatures with the upper body of a woman and then the tail of a bird.
"In Norse mythology they had mermaid-like creatures known as Merrow and they were said to inhabit the waters off the coast of Ireland.
"In West Africa, they would have a goddess associated with the ocean and fertility and would be depicted as a beautiful woman with flowing hair and is said to have abundance and prosperity and exhibit that for those who worship her.
"In Chinese mythology they would have Mazu, a goddess who's associated with the sea and the protection. She's said to be a mortal woman who became deified after saving her family from a storm at sea.
"In Africa, they would have this Mami Wata, who is a water spirit revered in many of the African regions, including voodoo and Santeria, and she's often depicted as a beautiful woman with the long hair associated with prosperity, healing and protection."
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Here is an old article and will have a new piece tomorrow:
I was checking headlines on a favorite news site and clicked on a pop-up blurb about “the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue.”
“So what makes this new blue pigment so special?” read the Forbes Magazine article. “To find out we need to once again consult the spectral profile of the pigment, and also at the crystal structure of the compound. The intense blue color of the pigment is a result of the strong reflection of blue light, and blue light alone. It absorbs green and blue light, making the blue color incredibly vibrant.”
Working on my computer inside a Starbucks I became distracted by the sound of a young woman giggling loudly as she waited with a friend for their drink orders. When
I glanced up she was flipping her long hair, even twirling her body around to make the hair fly. She could not have been more delighted with her brunette tresses, dyed a very unnatural blue!
Later that same day, waiting in the checkout line at my neighborhood grocery store, I suddenly noticed that a cashier who I sometimes encounter there had dyed the front section of his curly brown locks with an alien-shade blue similar to a Blue Man Group performer!
I then thought about how U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte had just dyed his hair an “ice blue,” as it was reported, to greet the Rio Summer Games.
This all led me to go home and type into Google something like “blue hair craze.” Among the articles was one from the London Daily Mail about--get this-- mermaid and “merman” hair!
“Men are joining in with a bold new trend of their own which is seeing more than a few fellas adding bright blue hues to their locks in a new trend being dubbed 'merman hair,' ” revealed the lifestyle piece. “The half human creatures of the sea may be more commonly associated with women in bikini tops and long, flowing, brightly-colored locks, but that hasn't stopped hundreds of men from hopping on board with the trend. From turquoise mohawks to teal-hued pompadours, there is plenty of inspiration for this vibrant look all over Instagram and Twitter.”
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Predictably, blue is a very important color to the secret societies. Just look at this entry from Masondictionary.com:
“Blue is the supreme color of Masonry. First, because it is that color which . . . among all those used in Masonry, is acknowledged by every Mason to belong to us all and no Mason, whatever his degree, questions the Master Mason's ownership of blue. Second, blue is the supreme color because it has, coupled with its universality, a place in symbolism which, both as regards importance of lessons taught and as regards legitimacy as a symbol, is second to that of no Masonic color.
“The use of blue in religious ceremonials, and as a symbol, comes to Masonry from many of the different peoples of antiquity. Among the Hebrews various articles of the high priest's clothing were blue. one of the veils of the tabernacle was blue. In his initiation into the Druidical Mysteries the candidate was invested with a robe one of whose colors was blue. The Babylonians clothed their idols in blue. The Hindoo god Vishnu was represented as blue. And among the medieval Christians blue was considered a peculiarly important color."
From the website Masonicworld.com is this definition of blue:
“Blue, then, is the Craft colour par excellence, used in aprons, collars, and elsewhere. Let us quote Bro. Chetwode Crawley. 'The ordinary prosaic enquirer will see in the selection of blue as the distinctive colour of Freemasonry only the natural sequence of the legend of King Solomon's Temple. For the Jews had been Divinely commanded to wear...a 'riband of blue' (Numbers 15:38).' A modern translation of that verse in Numbers is: 'You are to take tassels on the comers of your garments with a blue cord on each tassel.' The biblical text, then, refers to blue cords to be incorporated in the tassels worn by pious Jews, while Bro. Chetwode Crawley is speaking of blue ribbons which somehow became the embellishments of aprons, sashes and collars.”
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Novelist-poet philosopher Aldous Huxley, a tremendously influential figure in the 1960s-drug-culture-rock-and-roll hippie scene, was among the Beatles’ heroes splashed across the cover of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In his ever-popular book, “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,” which inspired the name of the rock band The Doors, Huxley gives a personal account on what he experienced taking the psychedelic drug mescaline, famously regarded as a "chemical means of inducing a state akin to religious enlightenment."
Huxley writes, “From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola.
“That chair--shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade.
“Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow--these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event.
“The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.
“ . . . Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment--or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair--I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance.
“The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrat- ing under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.
“The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the in- compatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.
“Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the 'Pure Light of the Void,' and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of un- mitigated Reality--anything!"
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